Do you want to say anything about anniversaries?

Anniversaries are very, very hard; they’re one of those things that you can’t escape. Every year you’ve got several anniversaries, you’ve got Christmas, you’ve got birthday, you’ve got, well I have Mother’s Day, and then you’ve got the anniversary of when it happened, they loom over you. As they get closer you can you can feel this, it’s very oppressive feeling, its, it’s that, it takes you to a dark place to be honest. It is, it sets you back. But I think what, what helps is to try and do something positive, like I’ll take lots of flowers to the cemetery and I’ll make it really nice. I always light candles and I speak to my Mum and I’ll say happy birthday or happy Mother’s Day, and I’ll write something to her. I think you need to again have some sort of connection with the one that you’ve lost, and if you want to cry a lot then that’s fine, let it out. It, you know, just because a year’s passed, two years, three years, four years, whatever it may be. You don’t have to be all cleared up and
ot cry anymore. I think you could cry for the rest of your life if you need to you know? Not every day, but on and off there’s going to be triggers, and they are going to make you go back and visit a dark place. But again you will come out, you will come out of it, and somehow you’ll see the light, I don’t know, you do somehow come through it.

How do you view the future now?

One day at a time.

Yes.

One day at a time. I think you feel broken in pieces, but you somehow do, you do carry on. You just have to I guess.

On the 12th October 2005, my Mum had gone to work. My Dad had dropped my Mum off at work and he’d called round here at lunchtime, and somebody had telephoned him to say that my Mum hadn’t turned up at her job. And instantly that unnerved me, and I felt quite worried. I felt like intuitively I knew something was wrong.

And my Dad said, Well you know your Mum, she’s always helping people. She’s probably stopped along the way and she’s helping someone. And it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right at all. So I said, Well can we ring the hospital? The local hospital, and make sure that nothing’s happened. That my Mum’s been taken in. So my Dad said, Okay, then we’ll do that. And we rang the hospital and no, no, no Mum, no lady of that description or age had been taken in.

So I got my Dad to keep ringing the place where my Mum was supposed to have gone to work. There was just no answer. Anyway my Dad sat for a while,

Then he went home. And I came up to bed for a lay down and I started crying because I just knew something terrible had happened. And I kept saying, Oh please Mum where are you? Please be alright. And I couldn’t rest. And about, my Dad was due to pick my Mum up at half past three so I was so stressed out and impatient that at half past three I rang my Dad’s house, and my Dad answered the phone, and I said, You, you haven’t picked Mum up have you? And he said, No, I’ve had to ring the police and report your Mum missing. And I thought, No, that doesn’t ring true. That doesn’t sound right. Because my Dad can’t have been there, come home, rung the police, all by half past three, so, something, no somebody’s not telling me the truth here.

So I then had to get up and I felt so anxious and stressed out. And it was a terrible time because I knew something was wrong. And I sat downstairs. I like to watch Home and Away, that’s my little treat for the day, and I sat to watch Home and Away, and I was still worried and thinking of my Mum, and then I heard footsteps, footsteps coming up the path, and I stood up and looked out, and I saw my Dad, and I saw a lady and a man with him. And I went to the glass of the door, and I just looked and I just started, I became hysterical, and I started saying, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, can’t be. And I opened the door. , they came in, and

They told you the bad news?

They just said; I was going around the house and wouldn’t let anyone near me and I was just saying, Get off me, no, no, no, no, no I can’t hear this. No, I can’t do this. And my Dad got hold of me and tried to calm me down, and they said, We have found a lady’s body, we can’t tell you anymore than that. And I was saying, Well what do you mean? Found a lady’s body, what can have happened? It is an accident? Has she taken an overdose? And I was running through my mind what could have happened. What has Mum had a fall and cracked her head or? And nobody could tell us anything. And then I just become detached. It was like I came outside of my body and I was looking at myself in this horrendous situation, but my body was trying to protect me. It felt like your body being protective, because it was just too much to take in. It was just way too much to take in. Absolute shock, horror, disbelief, I can’t hear this, because it can’t be true. And it was horrendous.

So what happened the next day?
The next day the police came back around, and I remember one of, the man came into the lounge and he said, I’m awfully sorry to tell you this, but your wife was actually murdered. And, I remember my Dad’s words, he went, Oh God. Oh. And we just couldn’t believe it, and like the first thing my Dad said was, Can you tell us, was she sexually assaulted as well? And, and, and he said, No, I can confirm that your wife wasn’t assaulted, you know sexually assaulted. And, I don’t know, I’d, you just go, you just can’t take it in, it’s just too horrendous, your mind cannot cope with such a huge shock.

Were you met by anybody from Victim Support?

Yes, they were on the scene. They came to see us at my Dad’s house but I feel like they were quite out of their depth. They didn’t quite know how to relate to us with what, what was going on. I don’t mean that unkindly, I felt sorry for them.

They just, you felt they didn’t know what to say?

Yes, they just, it was just like they were, well they were obviously shocked about what had happened, and they just had difficulty knowing how to communicate with us, on what level, what to say, what was the right thing to say, what was the wrong thing to say. They were sweet, they were lovely ladies, but I felt sorry for them because they were in a very difficult position.

Was it the same two ladies who met you at the court?

No, I don’t think they were at the court.

Oh, they just came to your house?

I just remember them coming to the house.

Did they just come the once?

Yes, because we said we said we didn’t want them to come again. We just said we were going to deal with it privately.

Did they approach you, or did you get in contact with them?

We were asked if we wanted to contact them, and we did. Yes, it was a lot for them to come and do, you know, they’re not used to doing that sort of thing down here. So it wasn’t their fault.

Do you have any sort of spiritual belief?

Yes. And that is the one thing that has really helped.

Do you mind saying a little bit about that?

Yes, I do believe in the after life. And I do believe in the spirit world and that when we leave this plane we go onto another plane, and we meet up with our loved ones. I do believe that. And I also believe that the one’s that we’ve lost are always around us, watching us, communicating with us, they see it all. And they are, I, a hundred percent believe that they are around us, and I have sought comfort through seeing a medium as well and had contact with my Mum who says she’s very happy.

Oh that’s good. Did you approach the medium after this had happened, or had you been in touch before with the medium?

I’ve always been spiritual. It wasn’t because of what had happened to my Mum, I’ve always had my spirituality and my beliefs and they have always been a comfort through life, so I just drew on it heavily, and I have seen a medium in the past, maybe two or three times and my Dad and I went but we booked in false names, because of all the publicity, we didn’t want to come away and think that she might have know who we were and she still told us what our names were. And my Mum was there, and she gave her name, said what had happened to her, told us all sorts of things about what we’d been doing, she told us about her funeral, and the pictures we placed on her coffin.

So when you say your Mum was there, she spoke through the medium?

Yes, yes. And she sent so much love, and said she was so happy, it was wonderful.

Do you also have religious belief?

I mean, yes I believe, I believe that, if I believe in the spirit world and the after life, I do believe in God in some capacity. I don’t think he’s this man sat up there, pulling strings. He’s just a great force, and I believe in Angels and things like that, yes. But I’m not a strict religious; I’m not a Christian or a Catholic or anything, and I don’t go to church.

The trial took place a year later. It took a year to get everything together. The police were amazing. I can’t thank the police enough for everything they did, they were marvellous. And we used to have weekly updates where they would come round and discuss what they’d found out, what, what they were going to use as evidence, you know there are certain things the police aren’t allowed to tell you, but they informed us with as much as they were allowed to, and they were always just wonderful. They were really good people. They really were, and that went on for a year. And then the trial started.

Could you ring up the police if you wanted information?

Mm. We had their mobiles and that. Yes, they were brilliant?

Did they come in pairs or did they come alone or..?

Sometimes they came in pairs, and sometimes we had one on his own, sometimes you might have five or six of them, you know a whole load of them.

Did you feel they were trying to get information from you, or was it, or was it they were giving you information?

Both really. I mean they had a lot of questions to ask; they needed to build a huge picture. Yes, it was both. But they were brilliant.

Yes, they were very, very good. The case they built was amazing. You know they really did work hard. They really did, and the trial started the following year. And that went on for I think it was two weeks.

You mentioned emotions of shock, disbelief, anger, sadness. Did you feel any other emotions?

Disgust, hatred. I thought that the person that done it was vile, absolutely vile. Loneliness, isolation, complete loss, totally overwhelmed, the overwhelming feelings of what’s happened, and what’s happened to your mum, just it’s just absolute horror. Just you can feel it running through you, and your heart, you, get your adrenaline every time you think about what’s happened you get an adrenaline pumping through your body and anxiety and, there’s, there’s feelings I felt that I can’t even put into words to be honest, I can’t name them. I don’t know, I don’t know what, what I would call them.

So it physically affected you too, because you had this

Oh it does. You don’t want to eat, you just, I wanted to die. I wanted to go to sleep and not wake up, or I wanted to swap places and I wanted it to be me that it had happened to, and that my Mum was still here.

You can’t get away from yourself, or what you feel, but you feel like running and there’s nowhere to run to. You just want to run away and, you just want to make it go away and you can’t. it’s like being trapped in this, I don’t know, this big black dark empty mess. You can’t see an easy way out. You know it’s going to take years to see even a glimmer of light.